An Angel at My Table

Frame's story is told with an intriguingly naked honesty but one that never drags the viewer into emotional prurience. It creates a fascinating portrait. Read full review

It tells its story calmly and with great attention to human detail and, watching it, I found myself drawn in with a rare intensity. Read full review

Told in Campion’s fancifully fractured style, An Angel at My Table is very accomplished, but it’s also an epic act of perversity: a 2-hour-and-38-minute movie about a wallflower. Read full review

Jane Campion has established a reputation for making slightly off-center films in which regular folks get glimpses of the darkness that lurks beneath the surfaces of their lives. An admirer of Frame's novels since she was a teenager, Campion builds her film around a heroine who defies Hollywood conventions; she's not beautiful or sexy or sophisticated, and her adventures are mostly intellectual. Read full review

A big, sprawling, unshapely thing, insufferably verbose and, at the same time, touched with magnificence. Read full review

Jane Campion upends staid genre convention with an impressionistic approach to character. Read full review

For Americans, the measured accumulation of detail can be frustrating. It's like listening to a story about someone you barely know and being forced to prompt the teller, "And then? And then?" Read full review

Campion's grasp of her material is intellectually and emotionally assured, while Fox's extraordinary performance demonstrates an honesty, courage and power that's rarely attempted, let alone achieved. Read full review

A great compliment to Campion is that the movie never seems less than genuine; it’s consciously anti-commercial. And when “An Angel at My Table” does steer toward a happy ending (this is a film about self-discovery and triumph, after all), even then it strives for gentle epiphany. Read full review

For all of the casual brutality of the hospital scenes, An Angel at My Table seems a very gentle film about a woman of such a passionate nature. Read full review

There are none of the usual artist-biopic clichés here. Frame, as embodied by three uncannily-matched actresses, is bright but intensely, awkwardly passive, and inhabits a chaotic, arbitrary universe. Watching her hard, slow struggle for self-respect, happiness and peace becomes a profoundly moving, strangely affirmative experience. Read full review

A potentially painful and harrowing film is imbued with gentle humor and great compassion, which makes every character come vividly alive. Campion constructs the film in a series of short, sometimes elliptical scenes. Read full review

Dodging the pitfalls of making a film about a writer is no small challenge, but Campion succeeds unforgettably in Angel at My Table. [14 Jun 1991, p.31]

This is filmmaking at the very peak of the medium`s potential. Read full review

This second feature by New Zealand's Jane Campion replaces Sweetie's outre style and sense of character with a quieter and seemingly more conventional approach, but without relinquishing the filmmaker's solid grasp of the offbeat, the feminine and the feminist. [12 Jun 1991]

Campion tells this longish story with a reverent touch and a painterly eye, tipping over into artiness only occasionally. [20 Sep 1991, p.G5]

Gradually, it becomes clear that Campion is taking an experimental, almost documentary approach to movie biography - avoiding clear villains, grandly dramatic moments, and the kind of phony movie dialogue so characteristic of the traditional Hollywood biopic. It's a bold and risky method, and sometimes it induces boredom. But somehow it works, giving us a extraordinary sense of one woman's life and the forces that made her, and a subtle, powerful feminist statement. [21 Jun 1991]

Jane Campion's screen adaptation of New Zealand writer Janet Frame's memoirs is sometimes brilliant, and never less than good. [21 Jun 1991, p.21]